Research for Practitioners: Social Interaction, Belief, and Learning

Several months ago, Clark Quinn and I were at a workshop andwe were discussing the problem of evidence-based practice. We agreed thatstaying connected with academic research was a critical activity forinstructional designers, but we both recognized that it was really hard to do. Busypractitioners just don’t have time to sit down and read all the way through thelatest copy of BJET (the British Journal of Educational Technology).

The Internet is a mixed blessing in this regard—a hugenumber of journal articles are freely available online, but the academicpublishers are firewalling them more frequently these days. And even if you canget access to articles—who has time to read them?

This Learning Solutions article is the first in a series intendedto address this problem. This series will present short summaries of academic researchthat may be of interest to eLearning designers. The Learning Solutions articleauthors (there are several of us) will offer a short, blog-length summary of eachstudy and include a brief discussion of the implications for design. Some ofthe journal articles we summarize will be newly released research, and somewill be older studies that we think still have implications for eLearning design.

We are very interested in your feedback—we want to knowwhether this is helpful to you as a practitioner? Let us know what you think—pleaseleave your reactions in the comments following the article!

The study

Okita, S. Y., Bailenson, J., & Schwartz, D. L. (2007).The mere belief of social interaction improves learning Pilot Study. In D. S.McNamara, & J. G. Trafton (Eds.), Proceedings of the 29th Meeting of theCognitive Science Society (pp. 1355-1360). Nashville, TN.

https://aaalab.stanford.edu/papers/cogsci07_okita_id_7451.pdfretrieved 9/11/12

The question

Do you learn more if you interact with a live person, or ifyou interact with a computer? Specifically, does the belief that you are interacting with another person (asopposed to a computer) affect learning?

The study used virtual reality to test this idea. Thirty-fivetest subjects interacted with a virtual character in a virtual realityenvironment. All of the participants interacted with the exact same character—theinteractions were scripted, and were identical, but part of the test subjectsthought that there was a real person operating the virtual character (an avatar) and the other group of testsubjects believed they were interacting with a computer-generated character (anagent).

The methods

They randomly assigned two different conditions to 35college students and then they asked each of the participants to read aone-page text passage that described how a fever works in the body of a sickperson. After being told they would have to tutor someone else on the content,they met a young woman named Alyssa and were given a few minutes to get to knowher (by playing the game Operation,of all things).

Then they told half of the participants that they were goingto interact with Alyssa in a virtual reality environment, while they told theother half they were going to interact with a computer in a virtual realityenvironment.

They gave the test participants a list of questions to askthe computer-generated character. For example, in the avatar condition,participants thought they were addressing the question to the person they’d met(e.g., “Alyssa, why do your hands and feet get cold when you have a fever?”),and in the agent condition, participants would address the computer (e.g.,“Computer, why do your hands and feet get cold when you have a fever?”).

In reality, both conditions were identical. All of theparticipants interacted with a recorded computer program.

The results

Each of the participantstook a post-test to see how much material they retained from the fever passage. Additionally, the researchers looked at howthe participants physically reacted during the experiment using skinconductance level (SCL), which indexes arousal. They used this measure to seehow much of a reaction the participants were having to the situation.

Overall, participantswho believed they were interacting with a live person (the Avatar condition)did better on the post-test. Their answers were evaluated on a 0-2 scale (0:incorrect or no answer, 1: partially correct but incomplete, 2: precise anddetailed).

Researchers also usedvarious tones for the responses. Some of the computer responses soundedexhilarated, some were neutral in tone, and some sounded shameful. (Figure 1)

Figure 1: The effects oftone and novelty on performance.

Participants did bestwhen they heard a novel tone from the avatar—for example when they heard anexhilarated response for the first time, or when they heard a shameful responsefor the first time. Participants who heard the different tones from thecomputer didn’t show a significant reaction, either in their physical responseor in their test results.

Implications for eLearning design

First—people seem to pay more attention if they think they areinteracting with a real person. We spend a lot of time trying to get ourlearners engaged with the material. One of the tools in our toolbox should besocial interaction. The increasing availability of social-learning tools makesthis more and more viable as a strategy.

Second—part of our role may be to help learners pay attention. Weall have an incredible number of stimuli competing for our attention. Nothingwas different between the two conditions here except that the avatar groupseemed to be paying more attention. Maybe one of our responsibilities aslearning designers is to help our learners pay attention. Novelty (in the formof a change in tone or media) and social interaction can potentially help us dothat.

I think this is all intriguinggiven the rising interest in MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses). Groups suchas Coursera and Udacity are trying to revolutionize higher education, but thisstudy at least suggests that the manner of delivery is not the only elementthat contributes to learning. MOOC designers are working on ways to providesocial interaction for learners, but I know that one of the things I get when Ipay tuition for a course with a live instructor is the obligation to meet theinstructor’s expectations. Just as many people find that personal trainers helpthem be more disciplined about working out, I use the expectations of aprofessor to help me maintain discipline around reading and studying a topic.